Homer and the Early Greek Poets

•Poets could lie. For, whatever poets might claim about the truth status of their own poems, the existence of variant legends made it clear that truth could vary from poet to poet. So that one poet's truth could easily become another poet's lie.

•There are indications that already in the early period poets were aware of their ability to craft and fashion their narratives. They might claim inspiration from the Muses, but they did not present themselves simply as unconscious instruments of the divine.

•By the end of the fifth century B C the poet is regularly described as a Poietes, a "maker", and his product is a Poiema, a "made-up thing". So they have inventive powers.

•The Odyssey is thus a highly self-conscious poem, which celebrates the delight of poetry and song: as Odysseus himself says, there is no greater pleasure in life than to listen to the bard at a feast, when the tables are laden with meat and the wine flows

•Poetry enthralls, but the nature of its power is ambiguous: it can tell the truth, but it can also persuade us that false things are true; it offers us pleasure, but at the time it destroys our judgment.

•Poetry also has the power to arouse intense emotions, and we find both Penelope and Odysseus weeping as they listen to the voice of the bard.

•Poetry has the power to make a man cry like a woman. Perhaps a prefiguration of the paradoxical pleasure of tragedy, that the depiction of suffering can give pleasure. There is certainly an awareness in Homer of the pleasure of remembered suffering.

•This emphasis on the affective power of poetry played a major role in Plato's attack on poetry, and in Aristotle's defence of it; it also formed the basis of Longinus' theory of the sublime.

•Greek attitudes to poetry were shaped long before the advent of literary criticism or literary theory. For Greek poetry contained within it a self-reflective and critical spirit which was there from the beginning: the earliest critics were the poets themselves.

•The competitive nature of Greek poetic performance continued to be a feature of Greek culture, and, with the emergence of drama in Athens in the sixth century BC, poetry and the judging of poetry become a matter of major civic concern

Plato and his Republic

•Plato wrote no treatise devoted specifically to poetry, yet his engagement with poetry was intense and life-long, as we can see not only from the dialogues in which poetry is explicitly discussed, but also from the frequent references and allusions to poetry throughout his work. Many of the dialogues themselves have affinities with poetry in their use of imagery, myth and dramatic technique, and the poetic nature of Plato's style has been recognized since antiquity. There was even a tradition that Plato had written poetry himself in his youth, but abandoned his early passion when he met Socrates and turned to philosophy. Certainly Plato writes about poetry like no other philosopher, yet determined to resist its spell.

•Plato's notorious hostility to poetry strikes the modern reader as very odd: in the Republic, he is concerned not merely with censoring poetry, but with removing it altogether, and his target is the entire heritage of Greek literature. Though hymns to the gods and encomia to good men will be permitted in the ideal state, there will be no place for the epics of Homer.

•Plato's critique of poetry is not merely of historical interest -- for Plato was the first thinker to formulate major questions about the function and role of art in society, and his writings on poetry, music and the visual arts are fundamental texts in the of Western aesthetics. ( what is poetry, and indeed art in general, and how does it operate? What is and should be the function of imaginative literature in society? Is it dangerous in that it encourages emotions and feelings which ought to be kept in check, or is it therapeutic in that it allows us to give vent to our emotions in a harmless way? Should there be censorship? Is literature a form of escapism or does it deepen our insight into the nature of people and the world around us? How can literature justify itself? )

•Like all the poets before him, Plato is acutely aware of the pleasure that poetry affords its listeners; but for him that is the source of poetry's greatest danger. In the Republic, pleasure is the key factor in determining what makes poetry 'poetic', but pleasure has nothing to do with value. Poetry aims solely at the gratification of its audience and not at moral improvement. And since the ignorant masses invariably enjoy what is bad for them, poetry is dangerous precisely in proportion to the pleasure it gives, and must therefore be censored accordingly.

• In the Republic, one of the central arguments against poetry is that it is psychologically damaging, for it appeals to an inferior elements in the soul, and encourages us to indulge in emotions which ought to be kept firmly in check by the control of reason.

•Moreover, Plato has three reasons for regarding the poets as unwholesome and dangerous. First, they pretend to know all sorts of things, but they really know nothing at all. It is widely considered that they have knowledge of all that they write about, but, in fact, they do not. The things they deal with cannot be known: they are images, far removed from what is most real. By presenting scenes so far removed from the truth poets, pervert souls, turning them away from the most real toward the least.

•One of Plato's most important and influential theories about poetry is that it is a form of MIMESIS or 'imitation'. The word mimesis has a wide semantic range, covering impersonation, copying, imitation and representation, and Greek draws no clear distinction between these meanings.

•The Platonic theory of Forms, according to which a metaphysical hierarchy is established, consisting of the ideal world of Forms, the sensible world of particulars, and imitations of the sensible world.

From the Republic, book x

Well then, shall we begin the enquiry in our usual manner: Whenever a number of individuals have a common name, we assume them to have also a corresponding idea or form. Do you understand me?

I do.

Let us take any common instance; there are beds and tables in the world --plenty of them, are there not?

Yes.

But there are only two ideas or forms of them --one the idea of a bed, the other of a table.

True.

And the maker of either of them makes a bed or he makes a table for our use, in accordance with the idea --that is our way of speaking in this and similar instances --but no artificer makes the ideas themselves: how could he?

Impossible.

And there is another artist, --I should like to know what you would say of him. Who is he? One who is the maker of all the works of all other workmen.

What an extraordinary man!

Wait a little, and there will be more reason for your saying so. For this is he who is able to make not only vessels of every kind, but plants and animals, himself and all other things --the earth and heaven, and the things which are in heaven or under the earth; he makes the gods also.

•Taking painting as the paradigm of mimesis, Plato argues that the painter is like someone who picks up a mirror and carries it around with him, instantly creating images of everything that he sees. But what he produces are insubstantial reflections of objects in the sensible world, which are themselves less real than the Forms, which alone have true existence. Since poets are also imitators, they, like painters, are condemned to operate at the third level of reality, their products being nothing but worthless imitations which reflect nothing true.

Aristotle and his Poetics

•The Poetics is the first work of theoretical criticism devoted specifically to poetry in the Western tradition

•Poetry for Aristotle is an independent art with its own internal logic, and his emphasis is primarily on its formal aspects without reference to the social, political or religious dimensions which had so preoccupied Plato.

•The Poetics is intended as an investigation into the nature of poetry through the classification of its different kinds and the analysis of their function and purpose. Though it contains elements of prescriptive criticism and description, it is primarily a work of aesthetic theory, whose object is to understand how poetry operates and the way in which it achieves its effects.

The Poetics is in part a response to Plato's strictures against poetry

•Whereas Plato views poetry as an inspired, and therefore irrational activity, Aristotle treats it as the product of skill or art, which is based on rational and intelligible principles.

•For Plato the poet has no knowledge, and the imitations which he produces are mere reflections of the external world, at third remove from the ultimate reality of the Forms.

•For Aristotle there is a close relationship between imitation and learning. ( since poetry presents us with 'the kinds of things that might happen' in human life, it gives us a generalized view of human nature from which we can learn more than we can from particular facts.

•Plato regards poetry, and especially tragedy, as morally harmful in that it stimulates emotions which ought to be suppressed

• According to Aristotle, the ability to engage our emotions is an essential feature of tragedy, and one that is positively beneficial in its effects.

•Pleasure, which for Plato is the source of poetry's greatest danger, is for Aristotle an intrinsic part of our response to poetry, since all human beings instinctively take delight in 'imitations'.

•Aristotle takes over from Plato the idea that poetry, together with other arts such as painting, sculpture, music and dance, is a form of Mimesis, but, unlike Plato, he nowhere explains what he means by this term.

•The artistic 'imitation' Aristotle discusses appears to have the following characteristics: # it represents or stands for the object imitated, # it is produced by the act of imitating, # it is similar to the object imitated.

•The artist can present things as they are, as they seem to be, or as they ought to be, hence what he offers is a re-fashioning of nature or experience rather than a straightforward copy.

•Aristotle explicitly rejects the idea that tragedy mimics reality, when he says that the poet's function is not to describe what has happened, but rather the kinds of thing that might happen.

•For Aristotle, tragedy represents the probable rather than the actual, but in doing so it deepens our understanding of the world in which we live.

•For Aristotle the poet is a 'maker' but specifically a maker of imitations.

Tragedy

•Aristotle emphasizes that tragedy must be complete and a whole, with 'a beginning, a middle, and an end' by which he means that the action must have an ordered structure so that events follow on one from another in a logical sequence, and not simply at random.

Music:

Music, says Aristotle, has a variety of beneficial functions: it can be used, for example, for education of the young, for relaxation and leisure, and for Catharsis.

CATHARSIS

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•A large part of Aristotle's discussion is concerned with plot, 'the ordered arrangement of the incidents', since he regards plot as the single most important element in tragedy. It takes precedence over character because "tragedy is a representation, not of people, but of action and life, of happiness and unhappiness -- the happiness and unhappiness are bound up with action.

•Poetics is notoriously reticent about the religious explanations of human suffering which are integral to the genre. His neglect of the gods, together with his apparent lack of interest in the social and political implications of tragedy, have been criticized by modern scholars.